“I’m telling you, you are.”
Emma looks as though she’s about to say something smutty, before thinking better of it.
Ryan’s not giving up. “You need to take a risk on this. I promise it’ll pay off. This could be one of those conversations you look back on when you’re a best-selling novelist. You know: ‘I almost didn’t enter the competition, but my incredibly talented writing tutor, Ryan Carwell—’ ”
“ ‘—and my friend Emma Deacon, herself a literary star in the making...’ ” Emma chips in.
I shake my head. “Why don’t you two enter, then?”
“You can’t be previously published,” says Ryan, with a shrug I’dinterpret as smug if I didn’t already know he doesn’t have a smug bone in his body.
“Or be really, really bad at first chapters,” Emma says, wrinkling her nose. “Whereas you, on the other hand...”
Ryan turns to me. “Do me a favor and become a literary sensation. And I do mean favor: I could really do with the career boost.”
“Very funny,” I say with a smile, shaking my head.
—
Caleb’s working late tonight, so after finishing my drink and promising the others I’ll think seriously about the competition, I head over to his studio.
It’s a chilly October night, feathered with the scent of wood burners and the promise of winter. My breath becomes wisps in the air as I walk, salt clinging to my skin from the onshore breeze. The cobblestones carry a cool sheen, the air around the streetlamps opaque with the finest of mists.
As I approach Caleb’s studio, I slow my pace. He’s standing outside, embracing a tall, dark-haired woman I’d recognize anywhere.
As they’re pulling away from their hug, he spots me. Following his gaze, Helen turns. I can’t tell from here if she’s smiling—I’m rooted to the spot about a hundred meters away—but if I had to guess, I’d say her expression remains steady, unyielding, and entirely unflustered.
Caleb calls my name, but I’ve already turned and started walking away.
“Lucy.” I hear his footsteps behind me. “Lucy.” He grabs my arm, pulls me to a halt.
I turn to face him but say nothing. He urges me a few steps farther along the street, presumably to escape earshot of his wife.
“Lucy... it’s not how it looks,” he says, his breath like hot smoke in the air between us.
The cliché is so bad, I have to resist the urge to wince.
Caleb sighs, glances down at his feet. “As in, she just showed up.”
“Right.”
“I had no idea she was coming.”
I nod again, more tightly this time. “What does she want?”
“Just to talk.”
I’m not too sure why that had to involve bodily contact—especially considering he’s always claimed things weren’t amicable between them—but I say nothing further. It’s up to him to explain, not me to ask.
“Listen.” I can tell he wants to take my hand but is sensing I might snatch it away. “Would it bother you... if Helen and I went and got a bite to eat?”
I swallow, feeling my stomach tip and pitch.Yes, it would bother me. Why is she really here? What is her game, showing up out of the blue like this?
I glance over Caleb’s shoulder back toward her. She’s not even looking at us, is staring down at her phone instead, her face made ghoulish from the blue light of the screen. Her lack of interest fits perfectly with the mental image I have of her—high-flying, someone utterly unaccustomed to hearing the wordno. You don’t rise to the top of the magazine publishing hierarchy without having a shard of ice somewhere inside you. I picture her at work in the West End—a corner office, floor-to-ceiling glass—with assistants running around after her as she stalks between appointments and meetings, yelling at people tojust get it done.
Does her indifference mean she has no interest in Caleb, or that she sees me as entirely inconsequential?
“I thought you said things weren’t amicable between you,” I say, folding my arms, already resenting him for turning me into someone with suspicions, a role I have no interest in playing. I think slightly bitterly back to what my sister said about him the first time they met, back in June:He just seems like someone who... wouldn’t be into playing games.
